01 March 2021

Platformer: “Twitter pulls a Patreon”

In addition to what Fischer describes above, mock-ups of Super Follows showed a creator charging $4.99 a month for features including “deals & discounts” and “community access”.

I’m excited about today’s Twitter news for several reasons. One, as I wrote here Monday, it speaks to the ways in which competition is returning to social networks, reducing the power of individual platforms to set all speech and behavior norms for the global internet. Two, as a longtime Twitter observer who has often been frustrated with its glacial approach to product development, I’m gratified to see the company begin to capitalize on the opportunity that has always lay in front of it.

And three, Super Follows represent a surge of interest in tools to let individuals create real economic value for themselves on social networks, giving creators more opportunity than they’ve ever had before. After a decade in which platforms’ ideas about creator monetization stopped and started with sharing a fraction of advertising revenue with their top stars, the giants are now taking talent seriously.

Casey Newton

More product plans from Twitter involving subscriptions, this time to enable users to pay creators directly for premium content. My first reaction was that this price tag is absurdly high: I am paying $5 a month for Spotify and HBO, giving me access to millions of music tracks and thousands of movies – why would I ever pay the same amount to see premium tweets from a single person?! I’m sure there are people willing to pay for special scoops, but it feels this approach will attract only a tiny niche of Twitter users.

A more reasonable model would be to have a subscription granting access to the premium content from the people you follow, maybe up to a certain number to prevent payments from becoming too diluted among them. Twitter has started diversifying its product lately, from high-resolution photos to audio tweets and Spaces, to Fleets and newsletters, and once matured, all these may become part of premium content inside Super Follows (confirmed in a later interview with Twitter’s head of consumer product, Kayvon Beykpour). Personally, I would be most interested in a better photo product to compete with Instagram, but even so I would not pay for premium access to individual accounts.

As I have reflected before, monetizing Twitter threatens to undermine its original openness and public influence. If the prolific and newsworthy accounts retreat behind paywalls, it would dry up the Twitter stream for non-paying users, who would likely abandon it in favor of more entertaining social networks – thereby reducing active users and the potential for further monetization. Another perverse effect could be that premium tweets will be simply reposted by other accounts with access, as it has happened with exclusive newspaper articles since newspapers started restricting their digital editions.

Subscription models such as this one also do nothing to promote new creators to a broader audience, instead rewarding ‘superstars’ who already gathered a sizeable audience, either on Twitter or at their primary profession. Casey goes on to discuss the advantages for underpaid journalists of having extra revenue opportunities, but this could lead to bad incentives as well, as for example a New York Times columnist writing PR pieces for Facebook.

For now, this is all speculation, as this product proposal is yet to be available to anyone for testing. But overall, it seems to me that this would erode the Twitter experience for the average (free) user, while (maybe) generating more revenue for the company and a select group of popular accounts.

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